Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Birthdays and Visas

Just in case you get the wrong idea dear readers, and anyone else who stumbles across my poor pittance of a blog looking for a description of life in Korea as an English teacher, class 1-5 yesterday was behaving worse than usual. They're normally just noisy, and in fact there's only one student that I've had to repeatedly tell not to take his clothes off and he's not in that class.

On the other side of the scales, some of my other students are very sweet! Especially the second year girls, probably because a) they're lovely! b) because I had a really excellent and gentle co-teacher for classes with them last year, so our classes were always pretty good and c) they are, for the most part, high level students, and even the ones that aren't particularly good at English are still fairly enthusiastic, so there were about 12 of them that joined my lunch-time 'Super Duper' free-conversation English club that I ran once a week. And really even the second year boys aren't as bad as the first years, in general, because even though they try to pull a lot of the same bollocks and are of course very noisy, there are still a lot who genuinely want to do well or enjoy studying English. So don't get the wrong idea; not all of my students are little hellraisers. Case in point about the girls, yesterday one of them, Jae-Eun, invited me to her birthday party on Saturday. I thought it was a rather sweet gesture, and apologised since I had planned to go to Daegu on Saturday. Her answer? "Ok, you go to Daegu first in morning, then come to my party afternoon! At my house! I give you address!" Her friend Yeon-Hee (another favourite of mine) interjected with "Amy is busy! BUSY!" Haha^^ Anyway, I had to mollify Jae-Eun with a promise of a 'birthday present' on Friday, and by singing 'Happy Birthday' to her in the staffroom (to mixed reviews: all the other teachers ignored us, Jae-Eun looked rapt, and Yeon-Hee put her fingers in her ears). And of course I'm going to make the whole class sing it to her today too, since we don't have class next week thanks to Chuseok (the Autumn Harvest Festival). Knowing Jae-Eun, she'll probably stand up and conduct the entire class, haha^^

Anyway, apart from that, I have some real information too for anyone looking for such. As some of you may know or be interested in knowing, adoptees can now get dual citizenship, entitling us to many things that are hard to manoueveur around when you're on the foreigner's short-term employment E-2 visa such as a credit card, websites, getting loans, buying a house, etc, or even getting a darn smartphone if you are that way inclined. However, getting this is a bit complicated, and as far as I can tell, to get it you need to be on an F-4 visa, which is tricky enough in the first place. Here is the link to a document detailing how you get said F-4 visa on the GOAL (Global Overseas Adoptees Link) website which also very kindly offers to help adoptees applying for dual citizenship, including free translation of documents for members.

And no, I don't have the F-4 visa, because it was so much work to organise (and yes, I am incredibly lazy), but I think I am going to make an appointment with someone at the Immigration Office or the Australian Embassy in Seoul just to see what's what and if there's some magical way not mentioned on the internet that I can apply for it from an E-2 visa. I'd still rather hold dual citizenship with England, but with all the bureaucracy crud and bollocks you have to go through to get anything done in Korea as a foreigner (especially as a foreigner with a long-ass name like mine that doesn't fit into a bunch of internet form name boxes), it's definitely worth looking into. Also, and I'm not saying that I'm going to, if I did have it and I'm ever teaching here again, I could walk away from my job if I hated it without risking being deported.

So anyhoo, hope that provides a nice and informative start to your collective Tuesdays. I'm feeling a bit down today for various reasons, but fingers crossed that the rest of the day is all sunshine and puppies :)